The SEI helps advance software engineering principles and practices and serves as a national resource in software engineering, computer security, and process improvement. The SEI works closely with defense and government organizations, industry, and academia to continually improve software-intensive systems. Its core purpose is to help organizations improve their software engineering capabilities and develop or acquire the right software, defect free, within budget and on time, every time.

Abstract

The Quality Attribute Workshop (QAW) is a facilitated method that engages system stakeholders early in the life cycle to discover the driving quality attributes of a software-intensive system. The QAW was developed to complement the Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM) and provides a way to identify important quality attributes and clarify system requirements before the software architecture has been created.

This is the third edition of a technical report describing the QAW. We have narrowed the scope of a QAW to the creation of prioritized and refined scenarios. This report describes the newly revised QAW and describes potential uses of the refined scenarios generated during it.